Triumphs and Turbulence

by Chris Boardman

  ‘Look,’ he shouted in his heavily accented English as he turned tiny circles on a machine that hinged in the middle, ‘Zey iz all crazy shit!’

  When we drove the same stretch of road a couple of years later only the sign was left, the windows dark and dirty. Evidently provincial France had not been ready for his vision of a garage/restaurant hybrid.

  We could, of course, log the good, the bad and the ugly as we trek around France each year and build up a reliable list of hostelries and eateries. That way we’d never have to suffer the same grubby lino twice. But if we did, we might never have found ourselves as accidental guests of honour at a wake somewhere in Provence, toasting ‘Old Tom’, or eating the most sublime pizza in the world served from a rusty transit van, or have met the mad bike mechanic-cum-chef. As John Syer told me back in Barcelona, elation and despair are two sides of the same coin. If you want to experience one then you must risk the other.

  The ITV production team who make the 3,500 km road trip each year are no less strange and varied than the places we end up. If there was any kind of formal recruitment process for staffing the Tour, Matt Rendell wouldn’t have a job; he’d have received a polite letter informing him that his application had been unsuccessful due to his being ludicrously over-qualified. But there isn’t, so he does. He is a supercomputer often pressed into service as a calculator.

  It’s hard to define his role in the production because he can fit in just about anywhere. He conducts daily post-race interviews in various languages, he’s the team historian, the statistician and the man we turn to if there’s a rider we know nothing about. He acts as an adviser on ad-break timings for the director during hectic stages and he’s the lead voice on the Tour podcast. After Jens Voigt, he’s also probably the world’s greatest source of enthusiasm on the subject of cycling, roaming the technical zone every day looking for people to share it with.

  He once ended up on the now-defunct Velo Club, a live post-race TV chat show of the kind the French seem to love: an endless talking shop with a huge cast of journalists, pundits, team directors and riders, still in their kit from the stage just finished and desperate to get away for a massage. It was pretty tedious viewing usually, but we all gathered round the monitor for Matt’s appearance and we weren’t disappointed. He was there to talk about his recently published biography of Marco Pantani, but the discussion drifted onto the subject of whether or not riders should have sex during competition. Undeterred by his lack of expertise on the topic, Matt pitched in with a lengthy contribution in perfect French, to the great amusement of the woman sitting next to him and all of us in the truck. Years later the director still insists on calling him Dr Sex.

  Matt is a walking encyclopaedia on many more subjects than just cycling (or sex): he’s even written a book on Latin American dancing, Salsa for People Who Probably Shouldn’t. In many ways, he’s the glue that holds the production together. Each morning of the race he comes into the Outside Broadcast truck with three copies of L’Equipe, one for Gary Imlach, one for himself and one that he always puts on my desk. I don’t think I’ve ever read one – my French isn’t good enough – but I imagine he performs this daily ritual with a tiny internal sigh as he says a silent prayer for my intellectual redemption. Gary takes his copy outside to spare us all proximity to his breakfast: a bowl of mackerel and quinoa. This is after he has lovingly crafted the first of his two daily espressos.

  I’m a firm believer that the composition of someone’s desk provides an insight into their personality. In the tiny area of the truck that I have claimed as my own, I spend hours each year crafting shelves from cardboard and gaffer tape, ducting the mess of cables behind to produce a clean workspace. To my right sits Matt, whose endless notes, newspapers, various recording devices and reference books threaten landslides in all directions. Territorial disputes are common and I have been known to repel trespassers with cardboard barricades. This isn’t required on my left flank because that’s where Gary sits. He doesn’t need bits of old boxes to mark his dominion, he uses a force field.

  Approximately 40 per cent of ‘Imlachville’ is dedicated to making the perfect cup of coffee. He not only brings his own nitrous oxide-powered hand-held espresso machine, there’s also a carefully calibrated grinder to pulverise his beans of choice. In addition, he has a special tool (only available via import from America) to realign the grinder’s burrs if they get knocked out of true on the journey round France. Perhaps the most telling item of parapherna­lia, though, is the set of digital scales used to weigh the beans and make sure he has exactly the right dose for each cup. The term ‘that’ll do’ is not in his lexicon.

  Gary’s eccentricities pepper more than just one corner of the truck. Once, as we walked across a piece of scrubland doubling up as a TV compound for the day, we came across the site of a burnt-out car. The vehicle’s husk had long since been removed; blackened debris and the smelted remains of an aluminium engine block were all that was left. Gary stopped, stared at the mercury-like blob and proceeded to prise it free. He then transported it all the way around France and took it home as an objet d’art.

  Gary has a sharp sense of humour too, which sometimes gets him into trouble. He concluded one on-air discussion of the latest insinuations of doping against Chris Froome with the words, ‘So, we still don’t know when Chris Froome stopped beating his wife.’ There was stunned silence on the set as he linked to the next piece of video.

  ‘What?’ he said, looking at the horrified faces around him. To Gary, the context had made his remark perfectly clear. ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ is a classic example of the loaded question, one that assumes guilt and makes it almost impossible for an innocent party to answer. Some elements of the French media seemed to be doing the same to Froome, putting him in the position of trying to prove a negative. It might have been clear to Gary, but it wasn’t to quite a few other people, including Froome’s wife Michelle, whose text to Ned Boulting – ‘WTF?!’ – arrived about 30 seconds later. The director suggested that he might want to clarify his comment once the recorded item was over.

  The joke was typical Imlach. He works harder than anyone I know to make every word count. The two words that led to our least professional on-air moment, though, weren’t so much crafted as mangled. We were on the set, watching the closing stages of a key mountain climb and waiting to take over from commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen once it was over. The pair of them were going full tilt and somewhere in the excitement, the Dutch rider Bauke Mollema became Bob Malka: ‘Bob Malka’s been dropped.’

  As mistakes go, it wasn’t really that funny, or unusual for commentators at the end of a four-hour stint, but as any schoolboy will tell you, there’s something about a situation where mirth is absolutely forbidden that renders even the tiniest spark of it especially dangerous. And once the fire is lit, the flames spread. I spluttered with laughter and that set Gary off, which was unfortunate as we’d just been put on stand-by to go live.

  ‘Boardman, pack it in,’ he said, forcing a straight face, as if just telling each other to stop laughing would work.

  ‘I’ll be alright,’ I said, although it was obvious I wouldn’t. The deadpan voice in my ear said ‘Fifteen seconds’. Gary, sensing impending disaster, began to really lose it. Evidence that the occupants of the Outside Broadcast truck had been infected was clear in the director’s voice as he wobbled through the count: ‘Three, two, one … cue Gary.’

  The unsuspecting ITV audience was suddenly presented with two twitching figures, oddly reluctant to make eye contact with each other. I fixed my gaze on my notebook. Unfortunately, for reasons I can’t explain, I’d written the words Bob Malka in bold capitals in the centre of the page. Tears and snot began running down my face. Gary tried to simultaneously welcome the viewers while frantically gesturing at me to get down under the desk. How my helplessly giggling three feet lower down was going to help him regain his composure I don’t know. He fought on valiantly for a few seconds, befo
re squeaking out, ‘We’ll be back when we can treat the race with the solemnity it deserves,’ before giving in to the inevitable and collapsing into an impromptu ad break.

  The Outside Broadcast truck is the centre of our summer. Driven through the night from one stage finish to the next, it takes the strongman tag-team pairing of Richard Gaines and Pete Howarth to get it round the route, over Alps and Pyrenees, while staying within EU rules for maximum allowable hours at the wheel.

  At dawn each day, it arrives with a hundred or so of its fellows on a predetermined patch of France – a car park, a town square, a diagonal quagmire at the top of a mountain – and disgorges its cargo of cables, cameras, bikes, gazebos and God-knows-what other equipment. As every other OB truck does the same, the ground is quickly hidden beneath thousands of coloured cables running in all directions. Somewhere in the cramped chaos a spot is found to pitch the two gazebos that serve as our TV studio.

  People say the camera doesn’t lie but I can tell you it bloody well does. I’ve looked at the monitor and seen myself and Gary, standing on a pristine set in front of a brightly coloured backdrop of cyclists and sunflowers. If the camera zoomed out you’d see the pair of us standing in mud, an umbrella gaffer-taped in place to stop the rain coming through the roof, and a gutter, cunningly improvised by cameraman Rich Hayward from plastic Vittel bottles, to drain the flood water away.

  The exterior of the truck is unremarkable and so, I suppose, is the interior if you work in television. But for an outsider, to walk up the steps and through one of its heavy doors is to be transported to an alternative near-future: a cold, dark space, all sound dampened by the carpeted walls, a bank of TV screens providing most of the light. I imagine wars are orchestrated and rockets launched into space from places like this. I could easily envisage the man perched centrally on his swivel chair, producer/director/dictator Steve Docherty, doing either of those things. He sits each day in his mobile mission control, issuing assignments to the troops, each of them sent out into the fray with orders not to return if they fail.

  ‘Good’ or ‘No, do it again’ are common pieces of feedback from the Doc, usually preceded by a long pause and a flat stare. He is not a man to waste syllables or sugarcoat his criticism. He keeps his praise in a jealously guarded jar hidden away in his desk. On rare occasions, he’ll crack it open, fish out an M&M sized morsel of warmth and hand it to a starved member of the team.

  The Doc’s leadership style is seen by many as harsh. It is, but it’s born of a passionate pursuit of perfection and the resulting shows are all the better for it. For those that come every year and give it their all, he is a deeply loyal and appreciative colleague. And it’s not as if he’s without a sense of humour. His impromptu, high-pitched impressions of Carol Kirkwood, the BBC weather presenter – who I suspect he secretly has a crush on – have to be heard to be believed.

  To the Doc’s right, at the rear of the truck, tucked behind a little curtain, is engineer Dave Thwaites, or Iron Dave as he’s known. He arrives each year at the start of the race on a Brompton folding bike, all his possessions for the month stowed neatly in the basket. Dave regularly gets up at dawn or even earlier to ride it over some of Europe’s highest mountains. Alpe d’Huez, Mont Ventoux, the Tourmalet: Dave has conquered them all on two small wheels.

  When I started full time for ITV in 2003, the entirety of my job was to stand on the set and answer questions when asked. That task, filling the gaps between interesting stuff happening, took up a full ten minutes of each day. My responsibilities expanded slightly the following year when the Doc, finding himself staring at the prospect of televising a long and particularly boring flat stage, asked me to go and describe the last kilometre, where all the action was likely to be. I felt like a kid who’d been allowed to cross the road on his own for the first time.

  The entire morning was spent crafting a minute-long script. Just before midday, I headed out to the finish line to record my monologue with our Aussie cameraman, John Tinetti. Experienced, mild-mannered and patient, John was the perfect partner for a newbie like me. The process of speaking a single sentence without stumbling was surprisingly difficult and my focus wasn’t helped by cycling legend Sean Kelly squirting water at me from the second-storey window of the commentary box. I pretended it was all very amusing, all in a day’s work for ‘us pros’. Mentally, I was throttling him. The feature, though, earned me one of the Doc’s rare praise-nuggets. After that they became my regular little contribution.

  Sitting between Gary and Steve often feels like being on Dragons’ Den: having to explain an idea to straight-talking, poker-faced industry experts, then wait while they mull it over, wondering what form the feedback might take. It’s not a process for the sensitive, but it is a unique, even privileged, learning environment. Over the years, the Doc has shifted from specifying tasks to prodding me to generate ideas. Along with Gary, he’ll take what I come up with, help me scope out how it might be illustrated, and proofread my scripts. The process feeds into my love of making things and their professional generosity is a big part of what keeps me going back. Well, that and the Doc’s impressions.

  In May 2011, sitting in a West Kirby café with Sally, I had an idea (OK, she had the idea) for something more involved than anything I’d done to date: a series of features to explain the technical aspects of bike riding to the non-expert audience: three-minute packages to enlighten the uninitiated without patronising the more experienced viewers. To do them properly, though, would mean planning and shooting them in advance of the Tour and that would take some of the show’s precious budget. I emailed an outline to Carolyn Viccari, the executive producer, and to the Doc. The next day, I got a reply from the latter:

  OK.

  Steve.

  I was immediately daunted by the responsibility those two confirmatory letters had put on my shoulders. As previous attempts to explain the inner workings of the peloton had been done using plastic figures and sugar cubes arranged in formation on a café table, I suppose the bar hadn’t exactly been set high.

  Although I knew how I wanted to illustrate my points – on a bike while riding – I realised I couldn’t do it on my own; a single rider in a crosswind looks very much like a single rider in no wind. I needed an accomplice. Ned Boulting was the perfect candidate for the role by virtue of being the only candidate.

  Ned and I started working on the race for ITV at about the same time. We are often mistaken for each other, something we’ve never really understood as we are very different people: I’m a planner, Ned thrives on busking it; I’m a worrier, he’s happy to go live on air with no idea of how he’s going to fill the space until he starts talking; he’s been known to wear cowboy hats and sing badly in public, I’m normal.

  The day before the 2011 Tour started, we assembled on a nondescript country lane in north west France – an out of condition ex-pro, a novice cyclist and a bemused TV crew following along in a Renault Espace. We had six features to film, the first of which was to show the effect of a crosswind on the peloton: how the riders fan out across the road to take shelter and what happens if one of them is forced to ride into it alone. The direction notes I’d written for the piece read: Ned rides behind, moves out into wind and is slowly dropped. In front, CB explains to camera what’s happening and why.

  As I rode at a steady pace down the lane, delivering my lines on the finer points of echelon riding, Ned brought the full force of the amateur dramatics training he’s never had to bear on his supporting role. He swerved out into the road and began rocking with exaggerated effort from side to side, straining, gurning, head bobbing like a piston. He wobbled to a stop, dismounted and threw his bike into the hedge in mock frustration. I ploughed on, playing it straight, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. I was so nervous that I made myself scarce when the rushes went back to the truck for viewing. Oddly, though, the combination of the deadpan and the daft seemed to work. The pieces went down well and have now become a staple of the show. Over the past
few years I’ve put Ned in a wind tunnel, hosed him down in a car park and subjected him to analysis on a psychiatrist’s couch. I’ve no idea what to do next with a man who simply refuses to be humiliated.

  Rob Llewellyn the responsible adult, Scottish Liam, Thumbless Tinetti, Blincoe the guitar playing soundman, Suave Mike the technical producer, Phillippe, Odette and Romain our wonderful caterers … there are whole books to be written about the Tour de France cast – and that’s without mentioning Carolyn, Brian and James back in London. Suffice it to say that they are my summer family, for better or worse. And like a family, we squabble, fight, walk out and walk back in, touching all points on the emotional compass every year regardless of the route.

  For all the drama, though, we keep coming back year after year, I’m not sure we can help ourselves. There’s a definite touch of Groundhog Day to the Tour; the same jokes and conversations and characters on what, a couple of days into it, begins to feel like an endless loop.

  The 2012 race was different, though. A British rider was going to win it.

  Three years earlier, I’d stood in one of the nondescript meeting rooms underneath the track at Manchester Velodrome, listening to Dave Brailsford predict exactly that to Christian Prudhomme, the Director of the Tour de France.

  After Beijing, the new Sky professional team had become Dave’s all-consuming passion and I’d enjoyed playing a small part in getting it off the ground. Although it was brilliant seeing him turn another dream into reality, and it was always tempting to get involved, this was clearly another 110 per cent all-in DB project, so I had reluctantly declined any full-time position with the outfit.

  Under his leadership, the GB squad had achieved so many unthinkable results that people had began to doubt their own judgement before questioning his, but when he assured the Tour boss he’d win the race with a British rider inside five years, even I had raised an eyebrow. I’d have raised both if he’d said the rider was going to be Bradley Wiggins. But here we were on top of the Col de Peyragudes, the final summit finish of the 2012 Tour, and Brad had just comfortably defended his yellow jersey on what was realistically the last chance for anyone to take it off him. With just a flat stage, a time trial and the procession into Paris to come, Dave’s dream was all but realised and he’d done it in just over half the time he’d allotted himself.